Damn It's Cold (Part 2)

(I know - Coal Miner, not Cold Miner, but's that's the way I have always heard it)

So it's still cold. According the the weather guys, it will be cold all day, then will warm up and be 50 by Thursday - either that our we are all going to die and they are just trying to make the last moments of Earth's life pleasant or something. Or, perhaps only people in the Southern Hemisphere will survive and they are trying to keep everyone from running south, because if all of the Earth's people went down there it would cause the Earth to tip over like this guy asserted about Guam:

Who's up for a little global warming right now? Anyone? Hello?

My main worry this morning was if the jeep would start. It's been a while since I did an oil change since the snow and ice and crap have interrupted my usual schedule, so I feared that the gunky oil would tax the starter's cranking power. When I was in Alaska, we all had heater cores installed in our vehicles and there were electrical outlets in the parking lots to plug them in. The heaters kept the oil warm so the sub-zero weather didn't cause the engines to freeze up. I suspect that the newer synthetic infused oils do not have that problem, or at least I haven't heard it talked about in the news. Another freezing fear was that when it was really cold the rubber in the tires got stiff. If you tried to go too fast too soon, the tires would reportedly shatter. I personally never witnessed that particular phenomenon. 

In any case, the jeep started. After only a couple of 'cuhchug's it caught and fired right up. The next question was how long to let it warm up. One school of thought is to let it warm up until the oil pressure gauge shows normal pressure. I am a bit more conservative, I wait until I see my water temp gauge start to move off of cold, then initially drive slowly at first to give my transmission time to warm up. My thinking that since the jeep is like 100 in car years, it deserves a little time to get up and moving around.

Stay warm out there. We only have another day or so of this crap to go (one way or another).